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Subband Center Signal Scaling Using Power Ratios

A method for scaling the level of the virtual center in an audio signal is proposed. The multichannel input signal is processed in the time-frequency domain by applying time and frequency dependent real-valued spectral weights that implicitly depend on the panning factors and the diffuseness of the input signal. Different methods to compute the spectral weights are presented and evaluated. In all cases, the spectral weights depend on the ratio of the power of a linear combination of the individual channel signals and the power of a passive downmix signal. Applications of the presented method are upmixing, stereophonic enhancement, dialogue enhancement, and pre-processing for semantic audio analysis.